The Movie:

As I have stated on my Samurai Cop review, I urge you to read my description of Dangerous Men before making your minds up through just my star rating. As a big fan of "So bad it's good" movies, I have a two-tier rating system for the kinds of films that are inept and woefully unsuccessful at every level of filmmaking you can possibly imagine, but are incredibly entertaining to a niche audience because of those qualities.

Just like many other memorable "so bad it's good" classics in film history, Dangerous Men gets a considerably higher rating for weirdos like me who can't get enough of bizarre awfulness, but should be avoided at all cost by anyone else. So, for bad movie fans, this delicious bit of unhinged insanity gets four stars, for every other member of the audience, it gets a big fat zero.

There's nothing more annoying for bad movie fans to be confronted with intentionally bad or campy movies as recommendations. No, I don't think Sharknado is a "So bad it's good" movie, since the awful campiness is entirely intentional. For classics of this type of film to enter our high (Or incredibly low, depending on how you look at it) standards, a complete lack of self-awareness mixed with endless ambition and tenacity against all odds are key. Some of the best examples of the "so bad it's good" movie, The Room, Manos, Birdemic, are all results of a determined auteur going through hell to get their unique vision on screen, no matter how talentless they might be.

And Jahangir Salehi a.k.a. John S. Rad definitely belongs in that category, even more so than Tommy Wiseau or James Nguyen, since it took a whopping 26 years for Rad to bring his incoherent take on the revenge exploitation genre to the silver screen. When Rad released Dangerous Men in a single theatre in LA in 2005, it made a whopping 70 dollars. Yet over time, just like every other fascinating bad movie, it gained a cult following and became a midnight movie sensation, making the eventual release by Drafthouse inevitable.

Every frame of this film feels like the greatest Adult Swim movie that Adult Swim never made. Fans of Too Many Cooks should have a blast with Dangerous Men's borderline surreal randomness and incoherence. Since the film went through a 26-year production process, it loosely jumps from one plotline to another, probably because the actors of each plotline got too old over time and fresh blood became necessary to keep the insanity going. It begins with the story of a woman whose fiancée is murdered, so she becomes a prostitute and goes on a murder spree to take her revenge on all those pervy and horrible men. Who can blame her, since Dangerous Men takes place in a universe where every man, and I mean every single man, is determined to rape this woman.

Halfway through the "story", we switch to a cop who wants to avenge the murder of his brother, so he goes after a borderline albino criminal named Black Pepper for some reason. This plotline results in the repetition of the exact same scene where the cop foils the rape of the same woman by the same man, using the same methods to put him down. The final ten minutes, complete with a "convincingly" acted blind girl who packs heat and a belly dancer who's proficient with the lamest type of kung-fu known to man, have to be seen to be believed (But again, if you're not a fan of bad movies, stay the hell away).

The story and the acting are terribly atonal and inept, to be sure, but what propels Dangerous Man to classic bad movie status is the random editing (I can swear the footage was put in a blender, and this is the result we get) and Rad's own repetitive synth score, which almost never matches the mood and tone of the scene it's supposed to enhance.

The Blu-ray:

Video:

Drafthouse's 1080p transfer is far too generously clean and crisp for a film of Dangerous Men's low standards. However, even though Drafthouse tries to bring the best version of the film on screen, they don't attempt to fix any of the glaring color correction issues, or moments of obviously bad cinematography. There are a couple of scratches and dirt here and there, but this is as good as it gets for a home video release of this modern bad movie classic, for better or worse.

Audio:

We get a lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 track (Mono mix), which is essential in enjoying Rad's score. That is, until you go insane from its' repetitiveness. Just like the video, Drafthouse didn't touch the many sound mistakes and baffling sound choices in the film, from dialogue where the ambient sound keeps abruptly cutting off, to the use of the exact same punching sound effect during the climactic fight.

Extras:

The extras dive deep into the bizarre production and discovery process of Dangerous Men, and are almost more fascinating than the film itself.

Commentary by Bryan Connolly and Zack Carlson: The authors of Destroy all Movies have fun mocking Dangerous Men, while also clearly having a lot of affection for the movie's sheer insanity.

That's So John Rad: This is a half hour mini-doc where the two guys who first discovered the film go around interviewing the other five people who actually paid money to see it upon its initial release. This is a lot of fun to watch, so if you have time for only one extra, make it this one.

Interview with Peter Palian: The film's DP, who stayed with Rad through the 26-year production, goes into his experiences working with the tenacious auteur.

Local Access TV Show featuring John Rad: This is the full episode of a 2006 cable access show where Rad appears for five minutes. Skip to the 20-minute mark to get to him.

We also get a bunch of Trailers for the film, a Booklet with an interview with Rad, as well as the DVD and the Digital Copy of the film.

Final Thoughts:

As incoherent and random as Dangerous Men is, it's hard to believe that its' insanity wasn't a carefully planned bit of surreal filmmaking. But apparently Rad was dead serious in his attempts to put together an action film, which makes his long-gestating passion project that much more fascinating. This Blu-ray release is a godsend for bad movie fans.

Oktay Ege Kozak is a film critic and screenwriter based in Portland, Oregon. He also writes for The Playlist, The Oregon Herald, and Beyazperde.com